I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole in thinking about kindness this week: between individuals, within groups, and in the classroom. Although teaching kindness isn't exactly teaching history, fostering a considerate atmosphere can greatly improve the ways in which we learn it.
Quite a bit of informal reflection has been done on academic kindness and unkindness. In these pieces, much has been made of the meanness of the academic world, expressed through, as Kelly J. Baker writes, "hostile questions and comments in seminars and at conferences, microaggressions, petty rivalries, sabotage and backbiting, racism, misogyny, ableism, ad hominem attacks, general rudeness, cruel footnotes and endnotes, harsh criticism of graduate students as a method to malign their advisers, remarkably long emails listing years of complaints, insidious gossip in the hallways, hate and disdain directed toward students, harassment, and even assault." The unkindness seems widely troubling enough to call forth a desire to counteract it-- there exists a Tumblr dedicated to small acts of Academic Kindness. Baker suggests that the scarcity of consideration can be traced to a lingering division between the intellectual and the emotional which persists in academic circles: "Thought is what's important. And emotion? Less so."
I think
many of us expect more from those who have spent their careers lifting up
histories of the marginalized, or forming intellectual communities in ways that
have inspired us. It is because of this that unkindness can dismay us so much--
not just an unpleasant moment, but a moment that makes us rethink our place in
the world. This is doubly true
in cases of imbalance of power-- when the unkindness comes from someone in a higher position on the academic hierarchy than their target. We have hope in those who have higher positions
than us that they will behave in ways that, if not completely aware of our
situation, are reflective of a certain element of awareness and sympathy. Instead,
sometimes it is as though they revel in their ability to make others unsure of themselves-- they use their power to spread unhappiness and deter people from
learning.
It is an awareness
of these imbalances that I strive to bring into my teaching, despite the complications that arise when one teaches while being in graduate school. Many of us who are
teaching assistants or graduate instructors do not often reflect on the complex balance
of power that in the classroom between us and our students. We often feel
powerless to control what, when, and how we teach; we feel that we are at the
mercy of student evaluations; most critically in the current time, we wonder if
our students will target us because of our identities, beliefs, or scholarship
for far-right harassment. The potential for injury comes from both "above" and "below" in the academic hierarchy.
However, our students have similar worries about us, particularly students who do not
fully understand the distinctions between lecturers, graduate instructors, and
full professors; particularly marginalized or first-generation college students. Very little of this is explained to you when you enter an undergraduate
degree program, and as a result I remember feeling mingled fear and awe at
anyone who stood in front of a classroom. I was afraid to talk to any of them,
and I worried about their opinions of me for minor actions. In this tense atmosphere, a little sympathy goes a long way.
Students are not just uncertain about their instructors, of course; they also walk into the first day of class with some trepidation about their classmates. In my (very
fortunate) experience, undergraduate classrooms tend towards superficial politeness
already. There may be days of tension here and there, or conflicts between
viewpoints about race, gender, ability, or sexuality that negatively impact
students or instructors. However, for most times in most classrooms, the
majority of students tend to be overly polite with one another, based out of
their disinterest in starting a pointless conflict (likely about a topic they
don’t feel they have a personal stake in) and the fear of being wrong or
appearing unintelligent. I'm not talking about the oft (too oft)-repeated fear of "offending someone" in a "PC culture" but rather the crickets and vague nods we've all received in response to a question like, "So, does everyone agree with Oliver's statement that the author of this document was trying to foment a Marxist revolution?"
Education can help
us more if we gain practice in disagreement about issues of interpretation, and teaching Reacting to the Past convinced me that aspiring to create an atmosphere where this could happen was desirable. Mark Carnes argues in his book Minds on Fire that Reacting to the Past creates a space in which students can comfortably disagree. In Reacting, students have a need to engage in conflict and take a stance which
will necessarily put them in conflict with others-- the kind of temporary conflict that is excellent practice for the more permanent real conflicts that await. The Greenwich Village game is ideal for this because its two conflicting sides actually agree on many
core principles-- supporting the rights of women, critiquing the horrors that befall working women in the 1910s, and the
need for positive change in a world which seems far afield of the vibrant place
they wish to inhabit. Yet they disagree on a few very critical points, largely
revolving around tactics-- how best to get to the world they want.
How does all of this relate to kindness? I think fostering a culture of kindness in the classrooms in which we teach helps to ensure that students feel safe enough to disagree even without the excuse of embodying a historical character.
It is interesting how many of the materials you can easily find on emphasizing kindness in the classroom deal with young children, as if kindness must only be suitable for children and irrelevant to the "real world." Yet I'd wager that many people learned a great deal about empathy and respect in college-- practicing concrete ways to help other people, joining groups dedicated to improving their communities and their world, or learning in their classes about the context of other groups and people which they had previously not appreciated.
Ideas about kindness don't have to be blatantly stated-- I don't have any plans to walk into my next class reminding everyone about treating one another with "loving kindness" (a reminder I got a lot in first grade) or handing out gold stars for sharing. In fact, the most effective thing I have done to promote consideration in my classroom was completely by accident.
Public speaking can
seem like the most daunting task to many students about to begin a Reacting
game, and Lily Lamboy has put together an excellent set of videos which have
been widely used among instructors who use RTTP. I used one of these, the eye
contact exercise, in the first week of one semester of my Reacting to the Past course. Students pair up and practice talking to one another with eye contact. In part, this was simply to get students used to talking in front of a
classmate and practice one of the important aspects of effective public
speaking, so that they would have the tools to feel confident in their
performance when it came time to argue for or against Anne Hutchinson's
banishment, or appeal to the Boston Church to let them become members. The timing was convenient because it broke up the tedium of "Syllabus Week" and gave us all something to do while we waited for everyone's books to arrive (thanks, bookstore!).
However, my choice
to begin with this exercise had an added benefit I had not realized. The
intimacy fostered by this exercise had lasting effects on the way in which students saw one another. Unlike an earlier
course, in which students had seemed uncomfortable with the amount of conflict
that arose so suddenly with a group of veritable strangers, the group who
participated in the eye-contact exercise seemed to feel more security
in their roles almost immediately. I can only base these observations on my own vantage point-- perhaps the difference in the air between the two classes was entirely because of their individual personalities, or in the way I'd explained the ground rules of the games, or perhaps my observations don't adequately reflect their opinions of their time in the course. Yet the change in atmosphere as well as student comments suggested it had an effect. One pair even told me at the end of the course that they had
become good friends who socialized outside of class because of their pairing
for the exercise. (This Modern Love column suggests that sustained eye contact can lead to love! No reports back from my class on that front.)
The icebreaker is obviously not a novel idea. There are a lot of activities that get students to do a sort of meet-and-greet to learn names, build rapport, etc. Yet I rarely remember these being wildly successful from my own undergraduate career. I think the eye contact exercise works for several reasons:
- It's straightforward. Nothing terribly complex about looking at someone else and talking to them, though it may be difficult in other ways.
- It gives a task to focus on other than memorizing a name. Similarly--
- There's not a lot to fail at. I hate the "name game" because I have a terrible memory and I don't care what anyone says-- it's embarrassing to begin your first day failing to remember "Prickly Pete" or whoever.
- It lets you focus on one person and one thing at a time, meaning that you're more likely to remember what you learned. I'm reminded of the polar opposite of this exercise-- those bingo cards asking you to find "someone wearing green" or "someone who plays a sport" or "someone whose name begins with m." Has there ever been an activity more reluctantly begun than any round of this game ever played?
- It practices a skill that will be important to students' success later in the game. So, to pull off the eye contact exercise specifically, I think a class probably needs to have a public speaking component.
- And, most importantly for my purposes in fostering kindness, it creates a personal connection, which leads to an appreciation for the opinions and feelings of others in the room.
Got some good ideas for cultivating collegiate kindness? Let me know!
Related Links:
Academic Kindness on Twitter.
Mark Higbee's article on Reacting Pedagogy which highlights, among other benefits, the social connections wrought by the games.
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